Chase Me Down, Link Me Up

Current Affairs

I just tuned in to CNBC to get my morning dose of the overnight and pre-opening numbers, and who should be bloviating from the studio but the former mayor of New York and utterly pitiful former candidate for the Republican nomination for president, Rudy Giuliani. Argh, is he making a comeback now? Can John Edwards be far behind? Will Mark Sanford be rehabilitated?

So here's Rudy, running at the mouth about the current president: "he's increased the deficity more than any president in history...." blah blah blah....

Well excuuuuuse me.

While statistically, numerically, that statement may be true, it is not unprecedented. During his eight abysmal years in the White House, George W. Bush also increased the deficit more than any president in history up to that time, and in the process managed to double the accumulated national debt from like $5-trillion to $10-trillion (and don't even start me on how much is a "trillion...")

So, ummm, Rudy? wherethefuck were you when your guy was running up the deficit "more than any president in history?" Where were all of these half-witted, cluster-Fox watching, "where's the birth certificate he's a commie socialist fascist wingnuts" when George Bush was increasing the size of the federal government by a full order of magnitude, lying us into a war, and lining the pockets of his corporate cronies and Wall Street henchmen?

Thomas Friedman in the NYTimes uses an expression I've been using for years now:

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

Of course, it's not just that whatever "stimulus" package Washington comes up with has to be "spent wisely." It's also that the whole political process by which such decisions are made needs to be rebooted as well.

Congressional reapportionment needs to be revisited. Constituents are supposed to choose their representatives, not the other way around.

And it might even be time to re-think the electoral college, a relic of the 18th century -- when it could take three months to tally the results from an election, a process that now takes hours if not minutes.

There is a whole host of Constitutional provisions that need to be restored, starting with the clause that mandates hard national currency -- not the printing press money that floods our national coffers today.

Or the provision that says that copyrights should be for a limited time, not virtual perpetuity.

And while we're at it, the Supreme Court might re-visit that 1888
decision that extended the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment to corporations, giving them the same rights as real
persons. That might go along way toward reducing the influence of big
money on the political process.

Or how about that antiquated idea that war needs to be declared by Congress, not the Executive? The framers knew what they were doing with that one, but it's been pretty much discarded since World War II.

So, yeah, by all means. "Reboot America." But not just so that we have better Internet on high-speed trains. So that the whole idea that became "America" undergoes the kind of restoration that will carry those concepts effectively into a new century and millennium.

Otherwise, civilization is going to be taking gas from the Chinese for a long time to come.

It's called a "correction" for a reason. And if the forces of
collective insanity do all they can to "stop the correction," they only
postpone the ultimate day of reckoning - and make it that much worse --
as Andrew Sullivan tries to explain:

Why? Why does the world owe us a soft
landing after the insanity of the last decade? Haven't the excesses of
the past shown that it is only through such market discipline that we
will ever avoid the easy path of borrowing out of greed? Yes, innocents
will suffer terribly, and many of the guilty will escape. But that is
life: we can and should try to help the poorest, but avoiding our
collective responsibility for this insanity seems a very bad signal to
send to ourselves.

The truth is: we had this coming. We deserve it. And we deserve leaders who are able to tell us that.

We can only hope that our new leadership has a grasp on what is really
going on, and sidesteps the temptation of going farther down the path
that has brought us to this perilous destination. But if Pelosi and
Reid and Frank have their way, Obama hasn't got a chance.

Had enough of the wild fluctuations on Wall Street (and Main Street)? Wondering what other surprises the future has in store? Wonder where "the bottom" is hiding?

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, columnist Mark Todd speculates what it will take to restore confidence and settle the international financial turmoil:

Weimar Germany experienced one of the greatest inflations in modern
history in 1922 and 1923. Eventually, the official exchange rate
reached 4.2 trillion marks per dollar. Some Germans heated their homes
by burning cash, since it was cheaper than buying wood. The inflation
finally was tamed by government bonds promising repayment in gold,
backed by land taxes also payable in gold...

America faces a stark choice. The path back to a gold standard is rocky and uphill. The current inflationary path is slippery
and downhill. One leads to integrity and stability. The other could lead to financial ruin. Which will we choose?

Besides burning their cash instead of firewood (anybody remember the episode of "Superman" in the 50s where Jimmy Olsen became a millionaire?), Germans living in the Weimar Republic were seen carting their paper marks to the grocer in wheelbarrows to buy bread.

So, my advise: until the world comes to its fucking senses and stops printing money as fast as the presses can run, invest in companies that manufacture wheelbarrows.

USA Today and Gannett columnist DeWayne Wickham offers a trenchant post-mortem on both the Republican AND Democratic party's future prospects:

A new American majority has emerged from the voting that made Obama
this nation's first black president. Obama was backed by just 43
percent of white voters. His largest percentages of support came from
blacks, Hispanics and young whites.

In the past, the Democratic Party has been much more in sync with organized labor and liberal interest groups than with the millions of new black, Hispanic and young voters who cast ballots for Obama. It would be a mistake for Democrats to assume these new voters will embrace their old ways of doing business.

Obama's coalition is the political party of the future. It won this election under the Democratic Party's banner, but there's no guarantee it will remain there. What seems certain is that this coalition is born of a new political paradigm -- one in which the power to elect a president is no longer firmly in the hands of this nation's white majority.

I probably don't qualify as one of the 'young whites' that Wickham cites as a pillar of the Obama coalition, but I'm definitely somewhere on the outskirts of the camp. And, particularly in light of the way that my own state's "Democratic" party discarded the primary victory of my duly elected State Senator Rosalind Kurita, I don't hold much allegiance there, either.

Wickham is essentially correct. The political landscape is changing dramatically and the dust has very much yet to settle. As we watch the knee-deep-in-the-old-paradigm stalwarts of Congress attempt to come to grips with the country's economic woes, it's not hard to imagine the electorate ultimately losing their patience with BOTH political parties and throwing ALL the bumbs out...

African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis.

Sarah Palin Is a Complete Idiot. And this is coming from FOX Noise, no less:

I think Sarah SHOULD run for the GOP nomination in 2012. Maybe she can split the party: one half consisting of thoughtful fiscal conservatives, the other half consisting or "social conservative" religious wing-nuts like Palin. Then we can have a real "Republican" party, and a new faction that can call itself the "Jesus Party" or some such.